Are there One or Two Aleatory Materialisms?

Abstract

The chapter will consider the continuity of Althusser’s thought and revise my previous interpretation backdating aleatory materialism to the sixties. I will analyse the context in which the concept of ‘encounter’ emerged in the sixties and show in a second moment that it is possible to identify this concept in the texts of the eighties, but only in one of the two tendencies which traverses this group of texts, the one I would call a materialist tendency. This tendency is intertwined with another tendency, an eschatological one — which emerged in the late seventies.